For that I usually use the package XML
. Allows you to tell which table of the web page interests. In this case this page has several. The third has nothing of interest, so I extracted the numbers 1, 2, and 4.
library(XML)
URL <- "http://globoesporte.globo.com/futebol/brasileirao-serie-a/"
tabela1 <- readHTMLTable(URL, which = 1)
tabela1
tabela2 <- readHTMLTable(URL, which = 2)
tabela2
tabela4 <- readHTMLTable(URL, which = 4)
tabela4
Note that you can use the arguments of the base function R read.table
, namely the argument stringsAsFactors
can be important.